


Paper Tigers

by Cyphomandra



Category: Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao To Now RPF
Genre: Don't Have to Know Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-13
Updated: 2011-11-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 00:39:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/pseuds/Cyphomandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On her first trip to China, Jan Wong met a factory worker at the Canton Zoo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Tigers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Adaptation Decay (AdaptationDecay)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdaptationDecay/gifts).



> Thanks to adaptationdecay for the prompt, and Jan Wong for the books - Red China Blues, Beijing Confidential, and Jan Wong's China. I also used Lijia Zhang's "Socialism is Great!" and a lot of searching on the internet. Beta thanks to Tahnda and China Shop, particularly with regard to corralling my commas. I am happy to give blanket permission for all secondary fanworks.

**Item, 1. Admission ticket to Canton Zoo. Handwritten on ticket, “June 5th, 1972. Chen.” Water damaged.**

Back at the number 57 factory in Guangxi, Chen Li builds trucks, bolting the frames together with a set of well-greased tools and his calloused hands. There is not enough good quality steel – there has never been enough steel since the factory was built, despite all the efforts of the Party. They stripped the hillsides for fuel and took the cooking pots from the peasants, and even that got them nothing more than lumps of pig iron. No-one says this. The production targets increase each year – over 100 000 units for the country, this year – and Chen Li has stopped thinking about what happens when the axles break. He is good at his job.

The factory shuts down every Wednesday, and if it is fine Chen Li pedals up the southern hills on his father's heavy bicycle, to sit at the top and eat dumplings wrapped in bamboo. He listens to the cicadas and watches the Yong River ferry chug slowly from one side to the other. When he goes home his mother will press food on him again, taking it from her own plate and saying that she doesn't like pork fat, or that this soup is too spicy. Eight years ago Chen Li's younger brother and sister starved to death. His family ate grass roots and earth then, anything to fill their aching bellies.

When he met his cousins in Canton he told them about the three starvation years, and the deaths of his siblings. His cousins were born overseas, in New Zealand, a country Chen Li has only the vaguest knowledge of; he does not think it is a country where anyone is forced to eat twigs.

(There are worse things than eating dirt. Chen Li does not tell his cousins what happened after the famine, when counterrevolutionaries were dragged out into the town squares for public denunciation and execution. Bodies ripped apart; organs cooked and eaten.)

He has asked his cousins to get him out of China. They make polite, noncommital noises. It is, they say, very difficult at the moment. They will send more money. Is there anything he needs, maybe some more clothes? They will write, they say. Keep in touch.

Three weeks after he returns from Canton it is the first of July, the birthday of the Communist Party. Chen Li attends the singing contest and speeches, dressed in his best shirt and trousers, and watches the women who watch him. He is accustomed to attracting female attention. His conversation with the Canadian girl in the zoo was well-practised, despite the language barrier. This time is different. He watches Jun Wu, a worker from a textiles factory who sings a solo in a high clear voice about her love for China, and does not want to look away with his usual teasing when she looks back.

After the contest they walk down to the river, through the park, and share a sesame bun. Chen Li wears the shiny new jacket his cousins gave him. When Jun Wu brushes the last of the crumbs from her blouse, he takes her hand. When they have another shared day off, he takes her rowing on the river, his hands over hers on the oars, their bodies close and warm. He climbs out of the boat to pull it into the bank when they get back, the mud soft and slippery under his toes. She waits for him to help her get out, her teeth white as she bites her lower lip in anticipation.

Jun Wu is eighteen. The minimum age for women to marry is 23, according to the Family Planning Committee; it is 25 for men, so Chen Li is already prepared to wait. They are from different hukou, registered with different towns, and even when married will only have twelve days a year together. Chen Li carries his pass with him at all times, even in his home town. It is easy to make mistakes.

Four years of waiting and Chairman Mao dies, and the factory falls silent for three whole minutes to honour him, drifts of white paper chrysanthemums piled in front of his portraits. A month later, and the Gang of Four is arrested, and the country feels as if a great weight has finally been lifted. When Chen Li and Jun Wu marry, the following year, she is already six months pregnant.

The one-child policy begins in 1979. Jun Wu is pregnant with their second child, another boy. Chen Li pays the fines. Deng Xiaoping has opened up China's factories to international co-operation, and Chen Li has been transferred from trucks to cars, his tools still useful and the production targets now more achievable. In another five years private citizens will be allowed to purchase their own cars, but for now Chen Li is still on his bicycle, his son propped up against the handlebars and shouting in excitement. At New Year's, Chen Li's mother gives her meatballs to her grandson, saying the texture is too rough for her gums.

One of Chen Li's cousins in New Zealand dies of stomach cancer. Jun Wu's mother suffers a stroke. Chen Li injures his back at the factory and takes to sleeping on the floor, holding himself rigid against any unguarded movements. He swallows powdered aspirin during cigarette breaks, the bitterness like the taste of bark, and snaps at his mother when she suggests he sees a doctor.

Chen Li's back slowly gets better. One of his co-workers at the factory opens his own repair shop, his connections with the Party good, and offers Chen Li work. Chen Li takes his older son in at weekends and lets him play on the battered concrete shop floor with his toy truck, far more brightly coloured than any of the ones Chen Li built.

Time speeds up and the world gets smaller. Chen Li's father dies, and his mother is shrinking, his sons growing taller. In 1989 students protest throughout the country, and there is a march through the town to support them. Chen Li goes with them. He holds one end of a banner announcing worker support for Beijing for a few hundred metres, but his back protests and a young woman is keen to take it from him. The students in Beijing are on hunger strike, a speaker calls. They are willing to die for the cause. For the first time in a long time, Chen Li thinks of his siblings.

The People's Liberation Army fire on the protesters in Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, possibly thousands, die. The speaker from the march is arrested, interrogated, disappears; Chen Li is asked to explain his participation to a neighbourhood committee. He is from good worker stock, red families through five generations and more, but they are concerned about the letters and parcels his family receive from their foreign relatives. Chen Li's apologies and explanations are eventually accepted, but it is another five years before he writes to his cousins again. In the meantime, hukou laws are finally relaxed enough for Jun Wu and Chen Li to live together. Chen Li's business is thriving. The skies fill up with pollution from all the new cars.

In 1999 Australia and New Zealand are granted approved destination status for China. After four more years of careful letters, applications, savings, money orders and bribes, Chen Li and Jun Wu are issued passports, strange and impressive documents, and register with an approved tour group for a fifteen day visit to New Zealand. Their sons do not come with them. There is not enough money, and they are less excited by a country that is not America.

When Chen Li gets on the plane to leave China for the first time, he remembers the zoo in Canton, and the first time he spoke to someone from the outside, someone who did not understand why he would want to leave. The Canton Zoo is modern, with exhibits that re-create the natural environments the animals came from; the fences are masked by plants and careful design. If you are not careful you could mistake it for freedom.

He does not think this trip will be an escape, either, but at least he knows better now where the bars are. He hopes the Canadian girl has learnt this as well.


End file.
